Rokeach tells us that humans operate on two distinct tracks simultaneously. This is the central structural insight of the book.
The "deep story" here is that conflict often arises when people share a Terminal Value (e.g., "We all want a safe society") but possess opposing Instrumental Values (e.g., "We should achieve safety through strict policing" vs. "We should achieve safety through social reform").
Before Rokeach, most researchers treated values as vague sentiments. Rokeach did something radical. He argued that values are not equal. They are organized in a stable hierarchy of importance.
He divided them into two types:
The genius move? He realized that conflict isn't between "good" and "bad" values. The real drama happens between two good terminal values.
The book introduces and extensively validates the Rokeach Value Survey, a ranking instrument rather than a rating scale.
Rokeach emphasizes that ranking forces trade-offs, revealing true hierarchical priorities rather than socially desirable inflation. Rokeach tells us that humans operate on two
Before Rokeach, values were often seen as infinite and culturally relative. Rokeach’s deep story challenges this. He posits that while cultures differ, the number of core human values is surprisingly small.
Through his research, he identified 18 Terminal Values and 18 Instrumental Values. The profound implication is that human nature is universal in its building blocks; we are all playing with the same deck of cards, just arranging them in different orders. This allows for the scientific comparison of a politician, a prisoner, a student, and a factory worker on the same scale.
A landmark contribution is the self-confrontation method for value change: The "deep story" here is that conflict often
Rokeach reports experiments where a single 30-minute session produced measurable value and behavior shifts up to 3–5 months later.
The most psychological part of the story involves how values organize the "self." Rokeach argues that values are organized into a value system—a hierarchy. This hierarchy is the template for the self.
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